


One Night in the VAB

by Dartz (The_Fenspace_Collective)



Category: Fandom - Fandom, Fenspace, Space Vehicles
Genre: Gen, Space Shuttles Are People Too
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-29
Updated: 2011-07-29
Packaged: 2018-01-01 08:28:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1042600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Fenspace_Collective/pseuds/Dartz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two space shuttles have a chat...</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Night in the VAB

Mel was looking at herself - her real body - her core having been moved temporarily to her avatar while the orbiter was prepared. It was so... limited. She leaned up against a railing, as she stared through her own cockpit windows. The name ‘Melchizedek’ was emblazoned in sharp black letters beneath.  
  
This was the Vehicle Assembly Building.  
  
This was where the Apollo missions had launched from. This was where her sisters had launched from. This was where she was, strapped up to an oversized fuel-tank come cargo-carrier capable of putting more than the take-off mass of a Gagarin in orbit, and a quartet of the largest and most powerful ion engines ever built.  
  
She should’ve been giddy. She should’ve been itching to go, just like before the race. Something about this was different.  
  
“Anxious?” said a voice beside her. It startled her. It stunned her to be startled. She instantly recognised it as Discovery.  
  
Stupid limited body with such poor sensors. At least she was in some proper clothes, and not one of those stupid uniforms they made her wear for the cameras.  
  
She heaved a simulated sigh, and looked over her shoulder. “A little,” she said.  
  
A lot, really.  
  
The contrast between herself and Discovery couldn’t have been more stark. Dizzy was lithe, Dizzy was graceful, Dizzy had an air of maturity and authority about her, of age and experience that belied the apparent youth of her Avatar.  
  
“You should be,” said Dizzy, coolly. “I would be worried if you weren’t.”  
  
Mel looked just a little bit dubious.  
  
“I screwed up a simulation today,” Mel said, after a few moments. “And got everyone killed. They sent me a false engine-out indicator, and I performed a shutdown of the opposite engine to maintain the drive field symmetry. I lost attitude control, and broke up...”  
  
Discovery spent more than a few seconds thinking.  
  
“Do you understand what you did wrong, and why it was wrong?”  
  
“Uh,” Mel nodded. “I responded too quick to an alarm, without checking other indicators to determine if it was false.”  
  
But, if she took too long, the drive-field would’ve warped, and different parts of the stack would’ve found themselves with different inertias and velocities. It would’ve shattered like glass.  
  
“Did you learn your lesson?”  
  
Mel nodded again. “And I know that’s why we do these simulations and stuff. I’m not stupid. It’s so I can kill them in safety, rather than in reality. And learn what not to do.... and stuff,”  
  
“I never said you were stupid,” said Discovery.  
  
“I know!” Mel snapped, before instantly regretting it. “It’s just... it’s. I...” she wrangled with the concept in her mind, trying to get it straight. “If I’m making mistakes in the simulator, I might make one in the actual flight. I don’t want to get my crew killed.” She stopped for a moment, looked at Discovery, then looked back into herself and her own memory of a video all Shuttles knew. “You remember her don’t you?”  
  
“I remember both of them, but yes, I do remember her. I’m the last who really does.” Dizzy smiled, a faint sadness in her gaze. “You’re a lot like her in your own way.”  
  
Mel looked out over herself, then down at the boosters.  
  
“How did she feel?”  
  
“On the morning? She wanted to fly, she was eager to go. She was always so glad to get the chance to fly, especially since she was never expected to be anything more than a structural test article. She took every chance she could.”  
  
Mel sighed again.  
  
“I just can’t stop thinking about it... the break-up. In the sims, when we get ‘Go for Throttle Up’, I can feel the tension. Everyone knows that that’s when it happened. And I start wondering what we’ll say right before I break up, I start wondering what’ll happen afterwards. Will they fly another Vulkan? Will they stop flying us? Will they stop building us? Will we get our own memorial beside the other two?”  
  
Discovery was silent,  
  
“After my ALT test, you warned me about what’d happen if one of us was lost. You warned me about the long shadow, what happened after both disasters and about what the effect of one of us dying again would be. And I was so afraid of screwing up your legacy and your dream that I got as far away from it as I could. I wanted to do my own thing, I always did.... I wanted to be Mel and not ‘another Shuttle’. I wanted people to think that, if I ever.... y’know.... then it was me,” she pointed to her chest, “ doing something I wasn’t supposed to, and not another Shuttle disaster.”  
  
“I want to be my own person, I wanted to be free of that restriction” Mel finished. “But now that I’m doing this Shuttle-thing, and people are calling me a Space Shuttle and drawing all these comparisons between the old missions, that I’m afraid of screwing it up. It’s all so...heavy. ” She looked up at Discovery, her expression searching for reassurance. “I’m afraid of killing everyone. I’m afraid of what’ll happen afterwards.”  
  
Discovery looked over the shuttle’s body, then down at some of the workers far below busying themselves on the crawler. She contacted her own body being rolled out from its hangar, pulling through a few things. She was talking with her own commander at the same time. The avatar returned her attention to Mel, her deep eyes locking with Mel’s own.  
  
“I flew both return to flight missions and I can tell you that I felt the exact same way before both. But if there was one thing both disasters proved, it was that we would continue. We would find out what went wrong, it would be fixed, and we would try again and keep trying. We keep moving forward.”  
  
It was Mel’s turn to go quiet. She was staring away at her own body. All clean and shiny for what must’ve been the first time since she left Hephaestus. Even the new OMS pods and tail assembly no longer looked suspiciously cleaner than the rest of her body. Lights played across the boosters, highlighting all the logo’s and emblems of the organisations forming the consortium. The tank was creaking. It even smelled clean. It was the royal treatment for her, every last little nut and bolt and tile being inspected and adjusted to perfection.  
  
Discovery smiled at her, “If you genuinely don’t think you can handle the mission, I could take over for you. It should be possible to move my core into your systems.”  
  
Mel’s face screwed up into a petulant pout. “Not a chance!”  
  
Dizzy laughed, “That’s exactly the response I’d expect. That’s what I like about you. We’re grown up and sober, we’re careful. But you’re out there doing anything and everything you can and then some. I see in you what we were in those first years, that sense of optimism and joy..” She placed a soft hand on Mel’s shoulder. “So please Mel, do it well for us all,”  
  
The whole stack began to move, crawling towards the open doorway. Hundreds of tons were slowly creeping their way towards 39-A.  
  
“I will.”said Mel. She was staring out the sky.  
  
\----


End file.
